For beginners, it would not be wrong to say that Litecoin is a lighter version of Bitcoin. Finding themselves in seventh place at the top of the cryptocurrencies classified according to their market capitalization on coinmarketcap (at the time of printing), Litecoin is a rather well-known currency with a large number of traders all over the world. Let's go deeper into what Litecoin is.
introduction
Again, Litecoin is a lighter version of BTC. It is basically a fork of Bitcoin that was created with the idea of bringing a Bitcoin clone to the general public for everyday use. Litecoin was one of the first Bitcoin forks, which was released on October 7, 2011 and was published on October 11, 2011.
While it is thought that Bitcoin is used to store wealth, Litecoin can be used to make daily transactions due to its low transaction price. It is said to be silver compared to gold (Bitcoin). Litecoin has also focused on helping to solve the scalability problem by offering over 50 tps that is better than Ethereum and Bitcoin by a mile. The goal was also to facilitate people so that they could make transactions on a daily basis by giving them a much lower transaction fee of almost $ 0.02.
The founder of Litecoin Charlie Lee, in the past was a Google employee and after laying the foundations of Litecoin, he also worked on the engineering side of Coinbase. He is also a well-known personality in the crypt who is also very active on his social media and has an open personality with respect to Satoshi Nakamoto.
Since Litecoin is a fork of BTC, it is often compared to BTC and what was the need for a fork when there are so many similarities. So, some of the differences are shown below.
Litecoin vs BTC
- Both Bitcoin and Litecoin use the same mining algorithm, namely PoW. Litecoin aims to have a more evenly distributed hash.
- Litecoin uses a simpler hashing algorithm, Scrypt, than that of Bitcoin that uses SHA-256 (discussed below).
- The supply of LTC is 84 million litecoin, compared to 21 million bitcoins, which is almost 4 times that of BTC.
- Faster, so it can be used for payments and daily use instead of storing money.
- The addition of blocks for Litecoin takes 2.5 minutes, four times faster than Bitcoin.
- Tps much higher than Bitcoin.
Extraction
Litecoin aims to make mining more decentralized than Bitcoin mining. Although both use the Work Test, Litecoin helps eliminate the need for very high processing powers using simpler hashing algorithms.
Proof of Works requires a miner to solve a difficult cryptographic puzzle to validate a transaction, and based on the consent formed by a number of nodes (miners) the transaction is validated, added to the block by the miner and in return, the miner is rewarded for having solved the puzzle first. In the case of Bitcoin, puzzles are much more complex due to the limited supply. This has made Bitcoin mining more centralized than decentralized mining, since a pool of miners with higher computing powers can add blocks while miners with less computing power lose the race. Litecoin, however, has a much broader offer, thanks to which they can have simpler hashing algorithms that can be solved by all types of miners and, therefore, contributes to decentralization.
According to the website,
Miners are currently rewarded with 25 new litecoins per block, an amount that is halved approximately every 4 years (every 840,000 blocks).
Reputation
Litecoin is a well-known currency, which is located at number 7 of the major currencies on coinmarketcap based on their market capitalization. Currently it is quoted on almost all the best exchanges of crypto including Coinbase, which is known to be very selective with their listings and contains only 5 currencies of cherries selected from the best currencies.
Currently, the currency is trading at $ 31.91. The team allowed users to download their desktop wallets for free to store their LTCs.
Team
The LTC team contains well-known crypt names and developers as shown below,
Conclusion
Because of lower costs and higher speeds compared to Bitcoin. It can easily be said that adoption rates for LTC may be higher in the future, with its use cases extending from being a cash deposit to daily transactions.